Fewer Quakes Tallied in Early 1996
There were 5,726 earthquakes in Southern California in the first quarter of 1996, most of them too small to be felt, seismologists from Caltech and the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Forty-nine of the quakes were magnitude 3.0 or above.
The quarterly numbers have been on a downward trend since last year’s magnitude 5.8 and 5.4 temblors in the desert north of Ridgecrest. There were 8,259 quakes in the third quarter of 1995 and 7,743 in the fourth quarter.
The most active quarter of the past five years was the third quarter of 1992, after the Landers-Big Bear earthquakes, when 25,500 quakes were recorded, 801 of them magnitude 3.0 or higher.
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